When I got home,
I pondered her question more. I contemplated how swiftly and easily the
movement was co-opted and how intensely a few diehards were punished. I
even looked back at some of the thousands of photos I took during the first year and saw a sea of mostly white faces. I scolded myself for believing this was a revolution.

Then… I did the hard work. The real work. I decided to try honestly answering my client’s question.

What’s changed, she asked? Well, brace yourselves, comrades…

Thanks to us not
finding a way to halt or slow or even identify the patriarchal, white
supremacist capitalist machine, here’s a teeny tiny glimpse at what’s
been going on since OWS “changed the conversation” on Sept. 17, 2011:

Some 2,660
children are born into poverty each day in the Land of Opportunity™.
Over the course of four years, that adds up to roughly 3.8 million.

Let’s take that
focus on kids to a global level. The United Nations estimates 29,158
children under the age of five die each day from preventable causes.
Four years = 42 million.

Please read that again:
42 million children under the age of five have died from preventable
causes since the first “mic check” echoed across Zuccotti Park.

While we’re
thinking globally, why not consider how the rest of the world might
answer my client’s question? What’s changed in four years? More drones
and bombs and other humanitarian weapons, more invasions, more
occupations, more poverty, more disease, more repression, more rapes,
more refugees, more prisons, more dehumanization, more marginalization,
more environmental racism, and, of course: much, much, much more profits
for transnational corporations, and much, much, much less hope for
everyone else.

Also, thanks to Occupy, we’ve been told that the problem is, well… anything from the Federal Reserve to fracking to student debt to NYPD tactics. Outside of a few activists, no one is actually naming the problem. No one is talking about the foundation, the root: patriarchy.

As a result, the past four years have offered no respite for females as a class. Institutional misogyny, rape culture, prostitution, pedophilia, reproductive repression, pornography, conscious erasure, and straight-up femicide remain the norm under phallo-centric rule.

The inevitable outcome of such a male-dominated structure is, of course, ecocide. The all-out assault against our Mother Earth, our landbase, our source of sustenance.

On that note, I’ll offer a few ecosystem-based answers to my client’s query.

Since Sept. 17,
2011: 324 tons of mercury were emitted into the atmosphere for global
electric power generation; roughly 5 trillion gallons of untreated
sewage, storm water, and industrial waste were discharged into U.S.
waters; and the Mississippi River carried 6 million metric tons of
nitrogen pollution into the Gulf of Mexico (creating a dead zone the
size of New Jersey).

Some 292 million
acres of rain forest have been destroyed; 19 billion tons of toxic
chemicals and 2 trillion tons of pesticides have been released across
the globe; and at least a quarter-million plant and animal species have
gone extinct.

(And, since 800
trillion microbeads of plastic enter waste waters every single day --
and that’s just in the U.S. -- I’ll let someone else do the math as to
what that adds up to over four years.)

I could go on…
and on and on and on. The damage is relentless and ongoing and
impervious to Occupy-related tactics and self-perception.

None of our
exhibitionist acting out or our Instagram selfies or our clever memes or
our accumulation of social media notifications or our sign waving and
petition signing and drum banging got us any closer to the root causes
and certainly no where near to creating sustainable social change.

What could/should we be doing?

Suggested first steps:

Admit we’ve been tragically ineffective

Recognize the sheer scope of what we’re up against

Identify the root, foundational causes

I know plenty of
folks will dismiss all this as Mickey Z. being negative again. I’ve
heard the “gloom and doom” canard for years, but let’s bring to back to
where we started: the gym.

When someone
first starts training with me, they’re likely to tell me all about their
(unhealthy) lifestyle and ask what I can do to help. If that person has
alarmingly high blood pressure or seems to need some kind of medical
clearance before training, am I being “negative” by pointing this out?

It might be more
upbeat if I complimented them on their outfit or their handwriting but
by no measure is it more helpful. Would they want me to “alter the
conversation” without giving them any new information or tools? Nope,
they came to me so I could name the problem and together, we’d start
working on a plan to address it.

This approach
may not be popular in age of social media narcissism and postmodern
navel gazing, but without it, we might as well start chanting now: FOUR
MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!

1 comment:

I believe I can speak for all concerned Americans when I chide you collectively to please clean up after yourselves before you wander off away to the next ridiculous hippie peace fest. The 99% left the parks 100% dirty last time.

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An American in Syria John Mesler 8/30/2015 In 1955 Alcoa was the first big sponsor to drop the Edward R. Murrow Show. Alcoa didn't...

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Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox is an independent online radio show and blog that strives to be completely free from establishment political ideology and focus on a message of peace, justice, environmental sustainability and economic equality. To this end, we provide educational and inspirational programs on topics related to these issues and we organize/promote actions working towards peace, justice, and environmental sustainability.